The real Downton Abbey

The fictional PBS series offers glimpses of the realities of life at Biltmore House

Jan. 10, 2013

The servants dining room in the basement of the Biltmore House no doubt hosted gossiping and scheming not unlike that depicted on the PBS series — but it may not have been in this room. / Bill Sanders/wsanders@citizen-times.com

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Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham, played by Hugh Bonneville, seen here with his family, faces a financial crisis in the current season of 'Downton Abbey.' / PBS/Carnival Films/Special to the Citizen-Times

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• Watch “Downton Abbey” at 9 p.m. Sundays on PBS stations. • Read Sunday’s Citizen-Times for more on the often remarkable parallels between the TV series’ family and servants and life at Biltmore House.

In this on-set photograph, the cast portraying Downton Abbey's servants prepares for one of many scenes set around their downstairs dining table. / PBS/Carnival Films/Special to the Citizen-Times

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What would Lady Mary tweet? It’s an absurd thought, since the “Downton Abbey” newlywed is, well, fictional. And she’d be about 117 years old today even if she existed.

But it’s no joke that the PBS series, its third season just under way, has millions of dedicated followers, many of whom light up Twitter and Facebook with their musings about the British show each Sunday night.

According to the MarketWatch news service, quoted in The Wall Street Journal, “The show’s loyal fans clamor for the start of the broadcast in a fashion reminiscent of ‘Mad Men,’ ‘Breaking Bad,’ ‘Homeland’ and other popular series of recent times.”

Sunday’s season three launch on PBS attracted almost 8 million viewers, MarketWatch reported, beating shows on some commercial networks.

Here in Asheville, we may feel a particularly intimate connection to the upstairs-downstairs drama in the Earl of Grantham’s Yorkshire mansion in the 1910s and ’20s. After all, during roughly the same period here, the Vanderbilts lived elegantly — with a couple dozen servants — at Biltmore House.

“I was so impressed (with the show’s accuracy),” said Leslie Klingner, curator of interpretation at the Biltmore Estate. “For me, it even adds a little more life to the tours of Biltmore House.”

Seeing the servants of Downton Abbey crowded around their downstairs dining table, then walking through the servants dining hall set up at Biltmore, makes it easier to imagine life at the Vanderbilts’, she said.

Many of the parallels between Biltmore House and Downton Abbey are easy and obvious, but others work on several levels, personal and historical, including both families’ connections to the sinking of the Titanic and the English Army during World War I.

To tease out these richer comparisons, the Citizen-Times talked with Biltmore curators and toured some of the little-seen parts of the Vanderbilts’ home for a story coming in Sunday’s Living section.

But just as “Downton Abbey” fans can’t bear waiting for the next episode, we couldn’t wait to start sharing our discoveries, so today we offer this preview of the story, starting with a glimpse of that servants dining room.

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The servants dining room

The servants on “Downton Abbey” seem to spend all their free time in the downstairs dining room, reading, sewing, gossiping, scheming. The same socializing likely took place in Biltmore’s servants dining hall said Darren Poupore, chief curator at Biltmore.

But there was at least one difference. At Biltmore, an upstairs room was also set aside for servants’ downtime; a similar space isn’t depicted on the PBS show.

“There were two areas where (servants) congregated,” Poupore says. “On the fourth floor is the servants hall, where the (female) servants could come to relax. It’s sort of like a sitting room, with a fireplace. ... They could have a cup of tea; they could relax” — at least until one of the room’s call bells rang.

Further clouding Biltmore visitors’ fantasies of servants clustered around the large dining table on display off the kitchen in the basement is the estate’s recent realization that it’s in the wrong room.

“When the basement opened in 1980, that’s where they thought the servants dining room was,” Poupore says. “We have now learned in our research that the room that is interpreted as the servants dining room was actually a packing room” — it’s right off the kitchen courtyard, where deliveries arrived and packages left — “and that the real servants dining room was a room behind that, which is now used as a conservation lab. ... Someday we want to correct that.”

Learn more: Biltmore’s servants’ dining room, ersatz though it may be, is a stop on the home’s audio tour. The digital audio devices that provide visitors a narrated house tour at their own pace are currently free with estate admission.

Money problems

In “Downton Abbey,” Robert Crawley, the Earl of Gratham, married American heiress Cora Levinson for love — and for her fortune, needed to maintain the estate, since the Crawleys’ wealth had dwindled. Then, at the beginning of the current season, he lost most of Cora’s money in an ill-advised railroad investment, putting his home once more at risk.

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George Vanderbilt spent a good portion of his inheritance — much of it from his father’s and grandfather’s railroad investments — building Biltmore House. After 10 years or so, guaranteeing the money needed to run the estate and to maintain his vast land holdings in Western North Carolina became a challenge. According to the Biltmore history book “Lady on the Hill,” the Vanderbilts went so far as to close the house and dismiss many of the servants in 1908, although they soon returned.

“It’s a problem that a lot of families have,” Poupore says. “Whether it’s a recession or poor investments, every family has gone through periods of financial struggles — even the Vanderbilts. ... But they managed to work it out.”

Unlike the Crawleys — tune in Sunday to learn more! — the Vanderbilts could not look to marriage or lucky inheritance to help them, and their problems were never as critical as the Crawleys’ seem to be.

One source of capital to maintain the Biltmore estate for future generations came not from desperation but from George Vanderbilt’s crusade to preserve Western North Carolina’s natural beauty. At the time of his death in 1914, he had begun negotiating to sell to the federal government what is now Pisgah National Forest. Soon after George died, Edith completed the sale of 86,700 acres for about $430,000. That’s just $10 million in 2013 dollars, well below market value — then and now — of the tract of land involved.

Learn more: “Lady on the Hill: How Biltmore Estate Became an American Icon” by Howard E. Covington Jr. is on sale at Biltmore and bookstores.